For almost the whole of human history, wood was the main act. It was the fuel that cooked food and smelted iron, the material that framed every house and hull, and the first bulk commodity ever moved at scale over long distances. In this episode Chris Keefer talks with energy analyst Mark Nelson about a material we almost entirely take for granted, starting with a fact hiding in plain sight: the grasping hands, binocular vision, and colour sight that define us were all built by an ancestry lived in the trees. From there the conversation turns to why wood, of all the products of photosynthesis, became civilization's battery, storing a century of sunlight in a form that can be felled and hauled away.

That storage came with a hard ceiling, because the energy available to any pre-industrial society was set by its land area multiplied by how fast the sun could regrow a forest. Chris and Mark trace that single constraint through the iron furnaces that each needed a forest standing behind them to the oak fleets that turned a Baltic chokepoint into the 19th century equivalent of the Straits of Hormuz. 

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz joins Decouple to examine the history of Iran’s nuclear program and the negotiations that produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As the agreement’s lead American technical negotiator, Moniz offers a rare inside account of his intensive discussions with Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi, explaining how personal trust helped make an extraordinarily difficult negotiation possible. He details the JCPOA’s restrictions on uranium enrichment and argues that its unprecedented inspection, verification and transparency provisions were even more important than its limits on nuclear technology.

The conversation also explores the origins of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, including the formative impact of the Iran–Iraq War, the country’s former structured weapons program and its subsequent accumulation of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Moniz assesses the consequences of the United States’ 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA, the limits of military action, the weakening of Iran’s civilian leadership and the increasingly difficult prospects for renewed negotiations. Despite these obstacles, he argues that diplomacy remains the only durable path to resolving Iran’s nuclear program, and potentially the wider challenges posed by its missiles, drones and regional proxies.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

Why are nuclear power plants so difficult to finance, and who ultimately pays when megaprojects run late or over budget? Chris Keefer is joined by returning guest Michael Seely, The Atomic Blender, for a deep dive into the capital costs, construction risks and financing structures that determine whether nuclear projects move forward or collapse. They examine the troubled European EPR experience at Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, where delays and cost overruns repeatedly pushed risk back onto reactor vendors and national governments.

The conversation then turns to Sizewell C’s regulated asset-base model, which allows investors to earn returns during construction while shifting more risk onto ratepayers and the British state. Chris and Michael also explore Vogtle, VC Summer, NuScale and UAMPS, asking whether private capital can realistically finance new nuclear construction, why government guarantees remain essential, and whether nuclear power should ultimately be treated less like a merchant investment and more like long-lived public infrastructure.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

In this reactor deep dive, Chris Keefer is joined by Navid Badie, Chief Nuclear Engineer at Candu Energy Inc, to explain the inner workings of the distinctive CANDU reactor. They trace how Canada’s decision to use natural uranium led to heavy-water moderation, horizontal pressure tubes, separate coolant and moderator systems, and the ability to refuel continuously while operating. Navid breaks down the reactor’s fuel channels, steam generators, online fueling machines, and the remarkable operating experience behind a technology that has completed nearly a million online refuelling operations.

The conversation also examines CANDU safety and longevity: large inventories of water, natural thermosiphon cooling during a station blackout, and the engineering behind reactor refurbishment. Chris and Navid discuss pressure-tube metallurgy, robotic inspection and maintenance, cobalt-60 and other isotope production, and why locally manufacturable natural-uranium fuel can offer importing countries greater fuel-cycle sovereignty. A technically grounded introduction to one of the world’s most unusual and capable reactor lineages.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

James Krellenstein returns to take apart one of the most persistent myths in energy discourse: the idea that there was a golden age when nuclear power was cheaper than coal. The plants people point to, Oyster Creek, Dresden, Point Beach, Quad Cities, were cheap to the utilities that bought them, but they were not cheap to build. General Electric and Westinghouse sold them as fixed-price turnkey projects at a deliberate loss, eating roughly 1 billion in 1960s dollars, more than 10 billion adjusted for inflation, across about a dozen plants. This loss leader strategy paid off. Between 1962 and 1976 the US nuclear fleet doubled its capacity roughly every 2 years, a stretch of sustained growth that rivals anything in American industrial history and still constitutes the largest nuclear fleet on earth in 2026.

The conversation traces how turnkey era prices distorted every nuclear cost comparison that followed, why the utilities themselves pushed to abandon turnkey contracts, and how regulatory change, slowing load growth, and across-the-board cost inflation turned the boom into a wave of cancellations. Krellenstein closes on the fundamental question for the present moment: if we want to set off another ordering cycle, someone has to absorb first-of-a-kind risk with a balance sheet large enough to guarantee a firm fixed price, and it is not obvious who that is. Back then GE and Westinghouse could swallow the losses because they were two of the largest industrial conglomerates on earth and commercial reactors were a single-digit percentage of their business. No comparable actor today has shown any willingness to take that risk on, which explains both how the world's largest nuclear fleet got built and why nobody has been willing to repeat the trick since.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

AI hype has bled deep into the nuclear sector, and in this episode, Chris Keefer sits down with returning guest David Helmer, an engineer and AI advisory consultant with a decade advising the US government on machine learning and autonomous systems, to examine what the technology can actually do, who benefits from inflating those claims, and what a correction would mean for nuclear's investment story.

The conversation covers the ELIZA effect and why human brains are hardwired to anthropomorphize language models; the structural gap between frontier lab costs and revenues; why hallucination and reliability problems are embedded in LLM architecture rather than solvable through scaling; and why the AGI narrative functions primarily as a justification for otherwise unjustifiable capital concentration. For nuclear advocates, the question is not whether AI demand is real today, but whether the speculative reactor developers pricing in hyperscaler contracts will still have a business if the AI bubble deflates.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

David Helmer spent years working on cooling systems for GE jet turbines before moving to Boston Consulting Group, the Applied Physics Laboratory, and West Point. He joins Decouple to explain why the gas turbine, despite being conceptually understood for centuries, only became buildable in the crucible of the Second World War, and why mastering it remains beyond the reach of all but a handful of institutions on earth.The conversation covers the materials science at the heart of the technology, where turbine blades operate above their own melting point and components in continuous distress are kept flying for hundreds of additional cycles before refurbishment. We examine why innovation cycles in aviation are measured in decades rather than years, drawing direct comparisons to nuclear's certification constraints and contrasting both with the faster but higher-risk iteration model of the rocket sector. The discussion moves from aviation into power generation, tracing the combined cycle plant's efficiency gains, the AI-driven demand surge now stretching turbine order books to 7 years, and what the scramble to convert end-of-life commercial jet engines for data center power reveals about supply chain limits. The episode closes on geopolitics: why only 3 companies produce competitive commercial jet engines, what reverse engineering cannot unlock, and why Russia's turbine capability was always more dependent on Western materials, machine tools, and maintenance expertise than anyone acknowledged until the sanctions arrived.Listen to Decouple on:• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rssWebsite: https://www.decouple.media

Grant Isaac, President and COO of Cameco, joins Decouple to explain why uranium behaves unlike any other commodity. With essentially zero fundamental in-year demand, a spot market that reports prices rather than discovering them, and a long-term contracting structure that ties producers directly to the utilities using the fuel, uranium operates by rules that confound anyone who approaches it through the lens of oil, gas, or base metals. Grant walks through Cameco's history as an integrated nuclear fuel company spanning mining, milling, conversion, and now fuel fabrication and reactor services through its Westinghouse partnership, explaining why that vertical integration reflects genuine customer intimacy rather than financial engineering.

The conversation covers the full sweep of uranium market cycles from the post-Atoms for Peace inventory buildup through the post-Fukushima bear market, Cameco's decision to curtail 70% of its production rather than sell into a floor, and what is structurally different about the current cycle. The historic secondary supply buffer that held prices down for 30 years is gone, Kazakhstan has learned the lesson that producing more into a weak market destroys national asset value, and geopolitical fragmentation is bifurcating what was once a seamlessly globalized commodity into distinct western and non-western supply chains. Grant argues that the long-term price signal, steady rather than saw-toothing, reflects a more durable demand base than any previous cycle.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

Nuclear construction once hit timelines that today sound implausible. First of a kind reactors completed in under four years, delivered at lower cost than mature designs, and executed with a level of coordination that the modern industry has largely lost. This episode uses the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) as a lens to examine that moment, not as a historical curiosity, but as a proof point that the constraints shaping today’s projects are not inherent to nuclear technology. The focus is on the underlying conditions that made that outcome possible, disciplined design completion before construction, tight integration between utility, vendor, and supply chain, and a development culture oriented around execution rather than iteration.

Amid growing frustration in Washington with the pace and performance of Westinghouse, there are signs the Trump administration is at least considering whether the ABWR deserves a second look. That tension opens a broader question explored in this episode: whether the industry’s problem is technological, or organizational. The discussion examines how fragmented ownership, incomplete designs, and weak competitive pressure have reshaped project delivery, and what might change if utilities reclaimed the role of developer. It closes by asking whether the path forward lies in new designs, or in rediscovering how to actually build the ones that already worked.

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media

In this episode of Decouple, Chris Keefer is joined once again by Michael Seely of the Atomic Blender to explore nuclear fuel reprocessing and the promise of unlocking vastly more energy from existing nuclear waste. We deep dive how processes like PUREX attempt to separate and reuse valuable materials like uranium and plutonium. Using real-world examples such as France’s La Hague reprocessing plant and the EBR-2 sodium fast reactor experiment, the episode situates reprocessing within its historical roots in perceptions of uranium scarcity and energy security.

While reprocessing is technically impressive, it is complex, expensive, and delivers only modest gains when used with today’s reactor fleet. Keefer and Seely unpack why issues like fuel degradation, handling challenges, and economics limit its impact, and what would need to change, such as the deployment of economic fast reactors, for reprocessing to live up to is most seductive narratives. 

Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rssWebsite: https://www.decouple.media

In this episode we are joined by Seaver Wang to discuss the physical foundations of China’s industrial dominance in solar, batteries, electric vehicles, semiconductors, rare earth magnets, and aluminum. We examine how these sectors are presented as evidence by climate activists that clean technology is delivering a new kind of green industrial superpower and interrogate that claim at the level of production. 

What sits upstream of the electrotech stack is not a network of modular green technologies, but large scale industrial systems that turn electricity into materials. These products are best understood as “congealed electricity.” In China industrial electricity, in particular, is still predominantly coal fired, often anchored in captive, mine-mouth coal plants tied directly to industrial clusters producing polysilicon, graphite, metals, and intermediates. 

These are not flexible, marginal power sources that can be easily displaced by wind and solar but rather capital intensive systems built for continuous output, with emissions embedded deep in the supply chain and largely invisible at the point of use.

The disconnect between hope and physical reality sustains a form of greenwashing that many climate commentators continue to reproduce, despite the underlying industrial system pointing in a very different direction.

 Listen to Decouple on:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4

• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple

• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss

Website: https://www.decouple.media